Nearly a year after extending their humanitarian parole, some 269,744 Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians have arrived in the United States to live and work legally in the country under the program. For some, the dream will come true, while others wait full of uncertainty.
WASHINGTON-
When the screen announced “You have been approved,” it felt like a lie to Carlos González. “I had to look again. It was still there and then I said to myself: It's true, I got parole!”, the Cuban told the Voice of America from Tampa, where he arrived with his family in October thanks to the program that has brought nearly 270,000 nationals from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti to the United States.
“It seemed like a dream after waiting for months,” said the young economist, who applied for humanitarian parole last January with his wife and two small children. “I can finally give my children a decent life… and start to really live, not just survive,” he added.
According to González, his heart “hung by a thread” during the nearly 10 months they waited for their case to be resolved, as his father-in-law supported the case against the young family.
“We thought they had forgotten us,” said the Cuban, who was born in Havana, where he and his wife Mayelín Alarriba, a sales specialist, were barely making ends meet on the salaries they received from the Cuban state, it is said.
González and his wife benefited from the humanitarian parole program, initially launched only for Venezuelans in October 2022, with the aim of bringing the migration crisis at the southern border of the USA under control. On January 5, 2023: US President Joe Biden announced its expansion to citizens of Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti as a “safe and legal” way to reach the country, coupled with the ban on irregular entry across the borders.
Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans were the most represented nationalities in the encounters at the border, which recorded record numbers at the time.
It was announced at the time that all applicants for the program must have a financial sponsor in the United States, reside in their country of origin, and begin the process through the mobile application. Up to 30,000 permits would be issued per month and distributed among the four nationalities.
Three Cuban passports with humanitarian immigration stamps are seen in Tampa, United States, December 21, 2023.
“The children go to school and we are waiting for the work permit. We want to work and move forward,” says González, who has settled in the Tampa, Fla., area, where he hopes to “raise his head” in the next few years.
A safe but delayed path
This Cuban family considers itself “lucky” after reaching the United States on humanitarian grounds thanks to immigration assistance. Thousands of applications remain pending, some dating back almost a year. “There are still a lot of people who don’t know what will become of them,” admits the young Cuban.
Read also step by step: How to apply for the new humanitarian parole for Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans?
As of the end of October this year, approximately 269,744 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans had legally entered the United States on humanitarian parole.
Haitians are the nationality with the largest number of beneficiaries of the program, with 99,110 people. The rest are reported to be 55,568 Cubans, 43,267 Nicaraguans and 71,801 Venezuelans records from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) by October.
The initial excitement of being able to emigrate with a two-year temporary work permit was followed by uncertainty due to delays in application processing that proved unpredictable. “You don’t know if it will happen quickly or if it will take months,” he assured VOA Elina, a Cuban engineer who preferred not to reveal her last name.
Elina's father filled out the application for his daughter's immigration to the USA on January 18th and so far “we haven't even received confirmation that it was received,” complains the 26-year-old professional. “It's sad because I'm afraid that suddenly everything will be over. I know there is a lawsuit that wants to get rid of probation,” he said, referring to the lawsuit A need is trying to stop the program in US courts.
“What you experience a lot is the frustration and delays that have occurred since the beginning. In the beginning, I would say from January to February, we saw a little bit that they accelerated the cases, that more people came in,” he explained to the VOA Immigration lawyer Rosaly Chaviano.
Also read: US announces new visa restrictions for those facilitating charter flights from Cuba to Nicaragua
At this moment it almost seems as if “the program has stopped, but at the same time it is obviously not so, because we see people continuing to enter,” warned the founder of the Chaviano law firm in Miami, Florida, where she handles dozens of cases of migrants and their families.
For some a dream come true, for others a disappointed dream
Carlos Zambrano and his sister, residents of the Venezuelan state of Táchira, applied for humanitarian parole shortly after it became available to people from Venezuela. Almost 400 days later, they received no response.
“We have seen many cases that came to light and were approved from October to November of the same year… There is no public information that allows us to know whether the cases are made known or not,” said the Venezuelan of 21 years.
One of those cases was Alexis García, a 45-year-old Nicaraguan who arrived in Miami last November. His daughter María was finally able to apply for parole on her father's behalf in October after filing taxes in the United States for the first time. A little more than a month after the trial began, García reunited with his daughter and wife. “It's almost a miracle. I say that the Virgin was the one who helped me to spend this Christmas with my family,” he said in a telephone conversation with the VOA .
Meanwhile, Zambrano and his sister are still looking to reunite with their mother, who has lived in Florida for more than two years.
“We want to leave because we are experiencing a terrible situation here in terms of basic needs. It is very difficult to make progress here. “You’re actually disappointed,” he noted. “I don’t like that it’s a lottery system because it’s unfair. There are people who apply now that day and get approved that day, while there are people who have been waiting since January,” he added.
Also read: The US reported more than 2.4 million encounters with migrants last year, an unprecedented number
However, the young man says he has not lost hope of getting approval.
The maximum number of people who can benefit from the program per month is 30,000 people of all nationalities. Although applications were initially processed on a first-come, first-served basis, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), decided in May to change the review process.
Since then, USCIS randomly selects about half of all monthly forms, regardless of their filing date, and reviews the other monthly half based on the form's receipt date.
“Since CHNV (humanitarian parole) operations were expanded in January, DHS said we would process 30,000 people per month, and we have done so,” a DHS spokesperson said Voice of America.
The Department of Homeland Security assured that this process “is intended to provide a meaningful and equitable opportunity for everyone who has a sponsor and is awaiting travel authorization during the process.”
Venezuelan José Francisco Sánchez Mendoza, 26, also requested release on humanitarian grounds on November 18, 2022. However, he has not received any updates on his case since then.
“I have no idea what happened,” he said VOA. “I am disappointed because although they say that the illegal route to reach American soil is unsafe, it is faster than the official one.”
Sánchez Mendoza compared his situation to migrants he knows who have reached the southwestern border of the United States on foot. “Acquaintances cross the border in three months by far… The problem is that I don't know how long it takes. Wait a year for the system to not give approval,” he added.
The Nicaraguan doctor was one of the first to be paroled on humanitarian grounds
The young man assured that his intention remains to leave Venezuela “in some way to another country and try to live with the small hope that confirmation will arrive”.
His dream, he said, was “to escape a country that wouldn’t let me out, that separated my family and my friends. A new beginning.”
Irregular migration routes remain
“The aim of the original program was to bring this situation under control and what we are seeing now is the effect that people already understand that it is very slow, that the waiting times are too long and therefore they are in turn losing their lives “even their dreams of being able to reach the United States,” emphasized lawyer Rosaly Chaviano.
Chaviano, who also defends cases of migrants who arrived at the southern border with Mexico, emphasized that in his opinion “in the beginning it helped a lot to control the border.”
“But as the months went by we saw the frustration continue to grow. What we're seeing now, I think, is the same as before the program started: that a lot of people are waiting at the border for appointments for CBP One and a lot of other people are coming from illegality,” he said.
For DHS, the Humanitarian Parole Program is “has significantly reduced irregular migration and have denied smugglers the opportunity to exploit individuals who have instead benefited from the expansion of safe, orderly and humane routes.”
Still, the number of migrant encounters at the southwest border reached a record 2.4 million last year, and other migration routes in the region have raised concerns among U.S. authorities.
Also read: US announces new visa restrictions for those facilitating charter flights from Cuba to Nicaragua
This is the case of Cubans who would travel to Nicaragua on charter flights to continue their journey north. The government of Daniel Ortega, an ally of Havana, decided to introduce a visa waiver program for Cubans, which de facto came into force on the bridge to Mexico and from there to the United States.
“Nicaragua became a shortcut for migrants who previously had to travel longer distances to get to the United States,” he said VOA Manuel Orozco, director of the Inter-American Dialogue's migration, remittances and development program in Washington.
In the case of the Haitians, he explained, they also choose to emigrate to Brazil or Chile and from there to the USA.
“Since the parole restrictions came into effect, people initially reduced their exit deadlines, but a gradual increase is observed until May (2023)… Nicaragua took advantage of the opportunity presented by the request of migrants to leave their countries and abolished pre-travel “Visa to the country to facilitate travel to the United States,” Orozco said.
Orozco explained that it is calculated that at least 100,000 migrants from Cuba or Haiti traveled to Managua on direct flights in 2023, “that is 3% of all irregular migration,” he explained.
Concerns about the future of humanitarian parole
This increase is also influenced by concerns about whether humanitarian parole will be maintained next year in view of the US presidential elections, Chaviano believes, although, he adds, this is a factor that still does not have such a big impact have like the verdict of the trial. against the program.
As the US prepares for the election, all indications are that the electoral duel will once again be between Democratic President Joe Biden, seeking re-election, and former Republican President Donald Trump, the favorite to win his party's nomination. Trump has warned that if elected he will pursue tough immigration policies and order “the largest deportation of illegals the country has ever seen.”
Also read “If someone tries to escape or scream, he will come out dead” | The horror of migrant kidnapping in Mexico
“I believe that the immigrant community, particularly those waiting in Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua, are really not looking that far into the future toward possible government change. At the moment, their fear is more justified.” about the judge’s decision. Even for immigrants here in the US, I don't think they see the election as a problem anymore. “I don’t think there is enough information or understanding of what impact a government can have on immigration,” he stressed.
The immigration lawyer clarified: “The more time passes, now in 2024, I believe that this fear in the community will increase, especially when this parole decision is made by the judge.”
“The most common and consistent question I get is: What can we do? Unfortunately, the answer is: wait. There is nothing that can be done to speed up the program. The only door USIS really leaves us is waiting,” he concluded.
Connect with the voice of America! Subscribe to our YouTube channels, WhatsApp and newsletter. Turn on notifications and follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.